Reply #96: No, it wasn't progressive. It was reactive. But...

[Captain Hilts]

he did understand that our country - and the world - screwed the Little Guy.

As a Harvard undergraduate he sided with the Boers against the British in the Boer War. NOT a popular stance in Cambridge.

He worked with under-privileged kids.

He married Eleanor. Remember, TR said that Eleanor was more like himself than any of his own kids and that's why he gave her a chunk of the change he won with the Nobel Peace Prize.

Getting polio underlined the difference between the advantages and opportunities of the rich and poor to him. Seeing the rural poverty of Georgia was a real shock as well, hence the Rural Electrification Administration because rural people paid FAR higher electricity rates than urban folks.

He was, throughout his life and presidency, adamantly against colonialism and used to stick it to Churchill on that issue frequently.

Reading about his time as Governor shows how some of the New Deal programs were given a trial run. Things like the CCC, etc.

He didn't surround himself with folks like Eleanor, Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins and Harry Hopkins by accident. He worked with Sen. Robert Wagner to get things like the Wagner act passed - as another means to stick it to wealthy industrialists.

FDR also had actually started integrating the military before his death. There's an interesting letter from the Sec. of the Navy to FDR about the surprising success of using black personnel as replacements on white crews, for example.

But FDR does disappoint at times: the anti-lynching bill, the tight money policy of 1937 that created another recession, not supporting the anti-Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, the internment of ALL Japanese no matter what.